David Carrington

First off, the most essential feature for me in a phone isn’t something common yet: WLAN support. My decision on getting my new contract has revolved around which WLAN-enabled phone will be good enough for me, as an “upgrade” from my HTC BlueAngel.

I was put off the Nokia N95 because it’s a completely different interface to what I’m used to, even though I did like the integrated GPS receiver. Combined with the reports of it being buggy and full of faults that Nokia won’t fix, I decided to go for the good old Windows Mobile device: the HTC Touch.

There’s a lot of videos on YouTube and various other sites showing the nice packaging of the product and the fancy features included (mainly the TouchFlo interface, designed to give quick access to the phone’s common features).

I knew that getting this phone, with half the processor speed of my existing phone and more restricted on memory, would be a little difficult to get used to. Almost straight away when playing with various programs I was getting “out of memory” messages.

Thankfully, those are avoidable by using software that doesn’t hog as much memory. For example, the built in music player on the TouchFlo interface is nice(ish), but it uses 2MB of memory. Especially without the ability to assign storage memory to program memory on this device – it’s nice to be able to use GSPlayer instead.

The other feature I found instantly different was that the screen is not as sensitive as my BlueAngel. With my old BlueAngel, I can lightly tap the screen – almost resting the stylus against it without applying pressure. With the new Touch, it’s the opposite – requiring quite a bit of pressure to pick up a screen tap.

Neither of these bug me enough to not use it yet – as the size difference is huge!

One of the many YouTube videos I watched about the device informed me that the power cable and headphones can’t both me connected, as they both slot into a single mini-USB slot. So when Orange asked if I wanted a free bluetooth headset, I took their offer one step further and came out of the shop with a set of stereo wireless headphones: Motorola HT820.

Thanks Orange!